Expedia.com founders Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink brought everyone the data on homes in the USA with Zillow.com. However, the USA's booming real estate market has dramatically slowed since last fall. So, Rick Barton is tapping into another pile of data and bringing it to the Internet. This time, it is a job-career site which includes employee pay scale and personal opinions on the workplace.

Glassdoor.com is hoping that similar to how Expedia helped transform travel choices by opening up information once available only to travel agents and insiders, their new site will do the same thing for job hunting. The site has about 3,000 salary reports and 1,300 employee written reviews for more than 250 companies. Once a visitor completes a company review and/or salary survey, they are granted anonymous and unrestricted access to the equivalent data for all other companies within the Glassdoor dynamic community that includes:

• Employee ratings on workplace and leadership, including CEO approval ratings.

• Compensation information by company and position.

Glassdoor relies on the honesty of the information submitted by people who remain anonymous. The information could be traumatic for some companies because everybody will see raw, unfiltered information. However, Ken Klein, CEO of real time software developer Wind River Systems . in Alameda CA, says guardedly “It could be good for our company.” Wind River has about 1,500 employees and has been reviewed on Glassdoor.com by two of them. Other big time developers that have been reviewed include Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Their data shows they pay in the over $100,000 USD, which is higher than the industry average of about $90,000 USD.

Barton faced similar criticism of the validity of the real estate data on Zillow.com which now it has a very high daily hit rate. To help launch the site, Mr. Barton says Glassdoor services will be free to those who submit a review. In turn, they will get access to the latest info on Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. This writer will visit the site in six months to see how well they are doing in the slowing USA job market. X